WHY UP?

Do you know how to achieve everything in life that’s meaningful to you? Are you on a path to leave a profound legacy for the world? Could you be the next Francis Bacon, Marie Curie, or John von Neumann?

WHAT'S UP?

The Upgrade Program (UP) is an experimental program that uses emerging technology, behavioral science, and applied rationality to help you set, plan, and achieve your life goals. It’s like a head-to-toe, inside-and-out life makeover. Each UP is unique, but they usually consist of 10 steps and run 100 days, 1 year, or 100 years.

1. Do Epistemic Housekeeping

You don’t know what you don’t know. And much of what you “know” is wrong. We start by rethinking your life from first principles.

2. Model Your Priorities

Out of trillions of possible actions, what should you do right now? To answer that, we need to build a quantitative model of your values.

3. Set Life Goals

Working from your values, we determine your life goals and decide how much of your time, attention, and money you’ll allocate to each.

4. Assess Yourself

What is your baseline success rate on your goals so far? Are you progressing, maintaining or regressing? We take hard data to find out.

5. Build a Personal Team

Self-development is the wrong framing if you want maximal success in life. Instead we focus on your team’s development.

6. Plan Each Goal

Actually achieving your life goals is hard. To make it easier, we create realistic, tailored, evidence-based plans for each goal.

7. Execute Plans With Team

We work with your personal team to do the thousands of discrete tasks necessary to realize your goals. The real magic is (strategic) hard work.

8. Analyze Results

Even with your team’s best efforts, many of your plans will fail. But we’ll mercilessly analyze the data and learn how to do better the next time.

9. Iterate on Plans

We’ll repeat the plan-experiment-learn process until we get it right. Trial and error is inevitable; the goal is to move quickly and cost-effectively.

10. Level Up

Once you’re reliably progressing on all your life goals, you’ve reached what we call UP v2.0. Then things start to get really interesting…

Vetted tools

Clean exocortex

Dedicated team

A carefully handpicked team of experts and assistants fully dedicated to your goals

Life calculator

A quantitative model that prioritizes each of your goals by return on investment

Ready-to-use files

A Drive folder with 1,000+ files ready to use to help you achieve your goals

1-on-1 education

A tailored course on 200+ of the most valuable self-development concepts

WHAT'S UP LIKE?

UP can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on how you approach life. Here are a few analogies.

You = Superhero

Imagine you’re a superhero (e.g. Batman). To become Batman you must have relentless drive, excellent strategy, detailed plans, ample resources, and be in peak physical condition. You’re completely devoted to your cause. UP is your Alfred or sidekick.

You = Olympic Athlete

Imagine you’re an Olympic athlete, aiming for gold. You are intense, disciplined, obsessed with metrics, dedicated to iterative growth, and in peak physical condition. You’re laser-focused on winning. UP is your coach or training partner.

You = Robot

Imagine you’re a robot. You have a CPU (executive functioning), hard drive (long-term memory), RAM (working memory), electricity (blood), chassis (skeleton and muscles), and software (beliefs). Every part of you is upgradable. UP is your robotic scientist or programmer.

You = Startup

Imagine you’re the founder of a fast-growing Y Combinator startup. You are intense, take calculated risks, love metrics, and want to build something to impact the world. You aggressively innovate to make it big, quickly. UP is your co-founder or adviser.

You = Organization

Imagine you’re the leader of a corporation, lab, military or government. You strategize, plan, recruit, manage people, execute, and evaluate results. You deploy substantial resources to create and capture large amounts of value. UP is your Chief of Staff or Board of Directors.

You = MMORPG

Imagine you’re a player in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. You can level up your skills, secure better equipment, team up with others, and engage in quests to achieve specific goals. Your experience is whatever you make of it. UP is your guild.

HOW IS UP DESIGNED?

UP has three core pillars, three modes, 50+ design principles, and 200+ concepts. It’s complicated, just like life.

Emerging Technology

Mindfully incorporating the most useful nootropics, psychedelics, supplements, wearables, smart devices, apps, and other tools makes you effectively “superhuman”. It’s an unfair advantage in life. UP guides you to the technology best suited for you.

Behavioral Sciences

Understanding the science of how to live well is extremely useful. But the research literature is huge and growing exponentially. UP acts as your personal research assistant and operationalizes what is most useful for you, when you need it most.

Applied Rationality

Your brain is the most complex tool you possess. And it’s notoriously full of buggy software (e.g. procrastination, self-deception, etc.). UP helps you debug that software and better understand yourself and more effectively pursue your goals.

WHY DO UP?

Because you’re smart enough to know that no one achieves great success without help. What exactly could you do with UP? Just about anything you want… Which areas of your life would upgrading yield you the greatest ROI?

End of Life

OTHER

WHO DOES UP?

Let’s examine four sample client scenarios.

Elijah the VC

Elijah is extremely busy and has been neglecting his health and family for years. He wants to make a change, but feels strangely stuck. Elijah does an UP that focuses on workload delegation, a rigorous fitness program, nutrition automation, meditation, and non-negotiable time for family and self.

Audrey the CEO

Audrey is a victim of her own success. As her company grows, she feels as if she’s losing her creative spark. She’s no longer as energized and optimistic as she used to be. Audrey does an UP that focuses on personal renewal through retreats, yoga, and trips with friends. She also plans an exit from her company to start a new firm.

Tom the Biohacker

Tom has tried everything possible to enhance himself–legal or otherwise. He’s seen some great results, but most things don’t stick and half of what he tries has unclear outcomes. He knows he needs support to maintain his idealized state of flow. Tom does an UP focused on optimization experiments in every area of his life.

Mia the Student

Mia is a straight A student, but silently suffering. She’s running ragged trying to keep up with her classes, job, extracurriculars, family, and partner. She took on more than she can handle and doesn’t see a way out. Mia does an UP focused on time and energy management, effective studying, and task outsourcing.

IS UP FOR YOU?

UP is for the wildly ambitious who intend to leave their mark on the world. Do you have the following?

AGENCY

A significant level of agency that you can focus on yourself

GROWTH

An unceasing hunger to be better than you were yesterday

TIME

Thousands of hours you and your team can dedicate over months or years

CAPITAL

Thousands of dollars to invest in salaries, tools, and assessments

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Instead of pursuing your dreams, we encourage you to execute your well-designed life plan. Please reach out if you’re curious about how UP might help you do this. The call is short, free, and focused entirely on you and your life goals. (We do zero selling–if we have to sell, UP isn’t for you.)